My wife's carpetbag is a Prada

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, June 30, 1999

We couldn't decide whether to vacation upstate or downstate, so we did both.

A New York campaign, even an exploratory one, travels on its stomach, so my wife ate pizza at John's Pizzeria near Times Square and pastrami at the Second Avenue deli.

She dove into a platter of chicken wings at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo and gingerly sipped a glass of Finger Lakes Chardonnay over a bowl of watery hippie vegetables at the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca.

She even wore a New York baseball cap - not a Yankees or Mets cap, but a cap from the SoHo gourmet store Dean & Deluca. That's the New York team Hillary Clinton probably knows best.

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We saw Hillary's Secret Service agents loading her carpetbags into a Jeep Cherokee outside a hotel on Central Park South.

Later we saw Hillary on the evening news in a pink pantsuit.

"Ba-dup, ba-dum," sang my wife in Pink Panther tones.

"That's it for Hillary. No pink pantsuit."

Now, I'm not saying my wife is running against Hillary and New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani for senator. But they're both vulnerable, very vulnerable.

If Hillary is elected, it's proof that New York has gone soft, falling for all that "it takes a village" pap, and I don't mean the East Village.

And the man who made New York soft is Rudy Giuliani.

Times Square is clean and safe. The subways are clean and safe. Giuliani has brought orderliness to muggings. In order to be beaten up or shot, you have to fit a police profile.

I don't know where Giuliani put them, but midtown Manhattan is completely homeless-less. The only shabbily clad people you see are tourists.

New Yorkers even say "Have a nice day," and they aren't reading from one of Giuliani's little etiquette cards.

That old saying about New York no longer holds true. If you can make it in New York, you still might not be able to make it in San Francisco.

These were just a few of the things my wife and I experienced while she was exploratorily campaigning in New York:

In New York, you raise your hand and a cab pulls up. New Yorkers won't even wrassle you for it anymore.

If you raise your hand in San Francisco, a guy says, "Now give me your wallet with the other hand." If you want a cab, you can apply to be a driver and meet the mugger faster.

In New York, the subway trains and buses run constantly and are air-conditioned. If there's any graffiti in New York anymore, it must be in an art gallery somewhere.

In San Francisco, the subways and buses never come, but the whole town is air-conditioned and adorned with graffiti for your trudging comfort and art-appreciation convenience.

In New York, you can cross the street and the traffic stops for you. In fact, traffic has been stopped since 1973, and nowadays it's all trucks, people from New Jersey and cabs (which is why they're so easy to hail).

New Yorkers have liberated themselves from cars, while people in the Bay Area have hung tough, pretending they still can get up enough speed to kill a pedestrian on Fourth Street at rush hour.

While New York is going as soft as Noah's bagels, San Francisco keeps making things tougher on people, plunking down ballparks along commute routes and replacing parking lots with highrises.

Still, the San Franciscan won't wimp out and abandon the automobile. The automobile is the Californian's birthright (or 16th birthdayright), and San Francisco is still technically part of California.

You gotta be tough.

Of course, you gotta have a real mass transit system to get drivers to wimp out and bail out. Will San Francisco give them that mass transit?

No way. They gotta be tough; as tough as a bus is to find.

Visitors have to be tough, too.

You want Extreme Games? Those are easy, except for the extreme lines to get into them. Every day is Extreme Games in San Francisco.